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Matthew 5.38-48 Yr A
Be perfect therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Sometimes we say that a couple are just perfect for each other - in fact I think I said that about a couple I married the other week, they understood each other so well, they had shared interests and yet each was their own person. My husband has had quite a few secretaries in his working life and two of them were just perfect for the job - they were quite different mind you, one was meticulously tidy and organised with a grasp of everything, the other was more intuitive and emotional but with a very secure knowledge of the business.
I'm sure though that if you asked any of these people whether they thought they were perfect they would have been horrified. Being perfect in a particular way - for another person or for a job is quite different from being a perfect person and this command from Jesus to be perfect like God seems quite unattainable, almost so difficult that how can we even try.
This passage that we had in the Gospel this morning is near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the one that starts off, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.' It's a difficult passage and I'm going to look at it in detail to try and discover what it really means and if we can get some ideas about how Jesus thinks we could be perfect.
Jesus in this passage was using an age old formula, telling us what the ancient law and the prophets said and then saying, 'But I say to you' and then stretching, extending and expanding the meaning. So he starts by talking about 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth'. In the Old Testament this law is written down three times, and we think of it as bloodthirsty and merciless, whereas in fact it was a way of limiting vengeance. In those more primitive days if one man injured someone from another tribe the response was usually that all members of the tribe of the injured man would take vengeance on all the members of the tribe of the man who had committed the injury. This Old Testament law meant that a vengeance was only to be personal, judged in a law court and in fact rather than the gory judgement of tearing each other limb from limb individually, an equivalent money payment was worked out. But even though this was a more sensible law than it first appears to us, Jesus tells us to reject completely all retaliatory violence. No forms of getting our own back or getting even are acceptable in Jesus' eyes. I remember some really funny accounts in the press a while ago about a woman getting even with her husband who had cheated on her by cutting up his suits and putting his wine collection out for the milkman. But as Christians we need to bite our lips and punch pillows, leave it to the law if it's that extreme, but somehow become immersed with God's grace in his law of love. There have been many good examples - but recently I remember Damilola Taylor's mother, forgiving the people who had killed her son.
Jesus' next command is then to turn the other cheek if we are struck on the right cheek. It would be very difficult for a right handed person to smack you with the palm of their hand on your right cheek, so this means that you would have been struck on your right cheek with the back of the hand. According to Jewish Rabbinic law, to be hit with the back of the hand was twice as insulting as to be hit with the flat of the hand, so this was not just an angry outburst but an intended insult. Those of you who watched the football final on Wednesday will remember the back-handed slap that Drogba gave Vidic, which seemed more insulting than a punch. I seem to remember that it was mostly as children that one delivered insults, but it obviously does happen in our adult life, when for example we are perhaps not given the respect that we think is due to us. Here again Jesus tells us not to resent or retaliate, and to continue to love.
The third example is a courtroom scene where a man is being sued and is presumably so poor that he has nothing left to give up except his clothes. The chiton or coat that he is asked to lose, was here a long nightshirt-like main garment,, but the cloak or the warm outer garment that was used as a robe by day and a blanket by night, could by law never be taken from a man and here Jesus is telling him to give that up as well. This blame culture is something that has become a great part of our everyday life, you can turn on daytime television and find adverts that tell you to seek legal action if you have been injured. We ourselves could be put in this position if someone tripped over a loose paving-stone on our drive. Equally well we could be guilty of trying to get as much as we can out of a situation. Apparently last year the royal Navy paid out more in compensation claims for injury at work for a year than it did on the fuel bill of the whole fleet. Many people now think it is their right to do something or other regardless of the effect on others. People who drive cross-country 4x4's think it's their right to drive along country footpaths, people who smoke think it's their right to smoke anywhere, and so on. So there is a dual message here, what Jesus is emphasising is that we must always consider the interests of others. He is of course, not literally expecting us to give up so much that we are naked, but to be so secure in God's love and care for us that we do not have to insist on our rights and are empowered to renounce them in the interest of others.
The last example where Jesus says 'if someone forces you to go one mile, go also a second mile' paints a picture of an occupied country. This was a Roman practice taken over from the Persians, by which government officials could force citizens of the occupied country to carry their equipment a certain distance. This is in fact what happened to Simon of Cyrene when he was forced to carry Jesus' cross. What Jesus is saying here is that we must not be resentful about the things we have to do, as part of our work perhaps, or the chores we hate, but think of them as our privilege, and always to be cheerful and willing.
The last difficult command that Jesus has for us is that we should love our enemies. The enemy in Jesus' day would have been the occupying forces, then all those who were outside the religious faith and then those who might be personal enemies. Jesus says that God loves everyone unconditionally, that he gives of himself and his creation to everyone, that the sun and rain fall equally on all. For us I expect that we have no-one with whom we come into daily contact that we could call an enemy unless we lived in the drug and gang culture of our big cities. But George Bush certainly says that the terrorists are our enemies and some people would regard some of our many European immigrants as enemies because they are perceived to take our jobs, our housing and our benefits. The sort of love that Jesus wants us to have for those whom we might see as enemies, is not of the romantic sort, or family affection but the Greek word used here for love, means endless benevolence, invincible goodwill. No matter what the enemy does we do not allow any bitterness against them to invade our hearts. Our love for them is not something which springs up in our hearts it is a love that need to develop with our will. It is the sort of love that might only be possible by asking for the grace of God to give it to us. Praying for that and for our enemies will help us to find that love.
So finally we come back to the last sentence of the reading. 'Be perfect'. Jesus has laid out for us several ways in which we can strive to be perfect. Don't take revenge or be resentful, don't insist on your rights to the expense of others, be generous and giving and love your enemies. Being perfect in the sense used here doesn't mean that we have to be like all the people we secretly want to be like, the people we already think are perfect because they seem to have all their life together, to have so much energy or are particularly good-looking. Being perfect in the way Jesus uses it here is to reach the fullness, the completion of who we as individuals are meant to be. He gives us hints as to how we can become god-like people, but the way we do it and the manifestation it takes is totally individual to each and everyone of us. We are not meant to be clones of each other, in fact our separate and individual perfections can only make a perfect whole if we are all joined together.
The one thing that makes us like God is his love which never ceases to care for us, no matter what we do. We reach the fulfilment, the perfection for which we were created when we learn to forgive as God forgives us and to love as God loves. |
